CST 334 - Week 7 Learning Journal

 This week the lectures better helped grasp how operating systems handle input/output and persistent storage. We covered topics such as differences between block and character devices, how hardware interfaces allow the OS to communicate with I/O devices, and how OS manages performance through concepts like hard drive transfer rates. I/O scheduling and RAID, file systems (abstractions, directories, links, volumes, mounts, design, and on-disk data structures). Understanding how these topics connect helped me understand that the OS acts as a middle layer that hides hardware complexity while still trying to optimize performance and reliability. The most challenging topics for me were hard drive performance calculations and some of the lower-level on-disk data structures. I understand the general ideas, like seek time, rotational latency and transfer time effect but I need more practice applying them to different workloads. The file system abstractions were my "aha" moment for the week especially after working on the research paper. The concepts like hard links, symbolic links and mounting because of prior usage but now having a clearer grasp of the concepts. It was interesting to realize how much design thought goes into making file access simple for users while managing complex structures underneath. I'm curious to see the concepts we learned in this class build onto future classes we take and topics we learn about such as caching, virtual memory. Overall, this week helped me see how many layers are involved in something as reading or writing a file. Even though some of the lower-level details can be confusing, I am better understanding the general broader idea of operating systems design. I think to better enhance my knowledge I need to work on more practice problems.